Automated self-service software applications are commonly deployed by business enterprises to support customers with inquiries and problems concerning their products or services. Such applications may be integrated with call center utilities to minimize the need for live support. Self-service support applications may use formal categories to describe the domain in which anticipated inquiries and problems may occur, such as a domain on computer products or financial services. The self-service support applications often assume that inquiry and problem categories are well known and can easily be interpreted by the users. The applications may further assume that the formal categories have universal definitions. However, these definitions are often dependent on the underlying back-end support systems. In addition, most users would prefer to describe their problems or explain their needs in their own terms, using free-form text. The user terms may not align with the formal problem categories or descriptions maintained by the user support system.
For example, a user may explain a problem in the form of the statement “My laptop fails when I run program XYZ after I have started a backup using program MNO”. Whereas, the user's company back-end technical support systems are typically categorized using very specific terminology, e.g., laptop/desktop, operating system, CPU type, application, program, driver, storage, backup/restore, etc. The self-service applications are thus less effective when their user interfaces are based on system-centric terminology that does not match with the users' terminology.
Furthermore, even if the users know the specific system-centric terminology, they may not be able to formulate their questions to a degree where satisfactory results can be expected, unless they are aware what constitutes a complete description of a problem. This is due to the fact the users do not know the specific domain that support system uses and are not familiar with the terms, attributes, and relationships in this domain.
There is thus a need for improved systems and processes for assisting users to formulate self-service inquiries and effectively processing such self-service user inquiries.